Inspirational Teachers Inspirational Learners E-Book

Will Ryan

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 424

Beschreibung

What is it that Inspirational teachers do differently? In short, they plan for their pupils to be inspirational. Many teachers who join the teaching profession do so because they were taught by inadequate teachers and they feel they can provide a far better and more exciting education for youngsters than they received themselves. Whereas other teachers speak with clarity of detail about stimulating and influential teachers who inspired their lives and now they want to do the same. This book is an examination of what our most inspirational teachers do in order to get creative and inspirational responses from children. It aims to put fun back into teaching, provide a framework for creativity in the twenty first century and act as a book of hope for the new curriculum proposals.

Leseprobe

To Daniel and Christina

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword by Ian Gilbert

Chapter 1 Inspirational Teachers, Inspirational Learners

Chapter 2 The Curriculum is Designed Not to Cover but Uncover

How Inspirational Leaders and Teachers Create a Powerful Curriculum

Chapter 3 Some People Get Lost in Thought Because it’s Unfamiliar Territory

How Inspirational Teachers Create Powerful Thinkers

Chapter 4 Not Everyone Will Be an Entrepreneur, but Everyone Needs to Be Enterprising

How Inspirational Teachers Create a Sense of Enterprise in Their Classrooms

Chapter 5 The Supreme Art: Awakening Joy in Creative Expression

How Inspirational Teachers Embrace Literacy and the Arts to Achieve Spectacular Results

Chapter 6 Emotionally Friendly Classrooms and Emotionally Triggered Learning

How Inspirational Teachers Create a Sense of Awe, Wonder, Spirituality and Wisdom in Their Pupils

Chapter 7 Not Everything That Can Be Counted Counts and Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted

An Inspirational Approach to Assessment in the Twenty-first Century

Chapter 8 Inspirational Teachers, Inspirational Classrooms

Appendix: Assessing Pupils’ Personal Learning and Thinking Skills

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

Copyright

Foreword

It means to ‘breath life into’, inspiration. Not ‘perspire’ or ‘expire’ but ‘inspire’. To take something inert and lifeless and make it live. Like God with clay when he made humans according to many religions. Only for teachers it is with eight-year-olds. With clay. And paints. And pens. And a sparkle in their eyes.

It’s great to hear a charismatic speaker. One who can transfix and then transform an audience with some well-turned words, a few early jokes and a decent PowerPoint. Many of us can point to charismatic teachers who sought to transform our childhoods with their character, their wit, their humour, their energy, their passion for a particular subject, their love of learning (although you have to watch out for the old joke about how primary teachers love children, secondary teachers love subjects and university lecturers love themselves).

Will Ryan takes things one step further, though, with a distinction that I hadn’t thought about until he put it to me in one of our first meetings.

When it comes to being an inspirational teacher, it’s not about you.

If the children in your classroom are spellbound by your performance in the classroom then you are charismatic but not inspiring. And if you want to inspire children then you must learn to stop taking their breath away.

I remember visiting a very successful secondary school near the Lake District several years ago as part of my day job. They boasted a particularly charismatic head whose character permeated the entire school and whose name impregnated every sentence. There was not a conversation that I had with student or teacher that did not include this man. Like ‘Blackpool’ in a stick of rock, wherever you sliced this school his name was there. This man didn’t inspire the school, he was the school. And if like Alan Bradley he went under a Blackpool tram the day after my visit, then that school wouldn’t so much grind to a halt as come off the rails completely. Charismatic this man may have been but inspiring he was not.

The very much flavour of the month PISA reports constantly highlight the importance of good teachers when it comes to riding high on the international league tables. ‘The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers’ as the 2007 McKinsey Report on the PISA findings, How the world’s best-performing school systems come out on top, trumpets. This is something that the current UK government has picked up on (I say ‘current’ in case things have changed by the time this book comes to print. I can dream can’t I … ?). Teaching is back centre stage again in the UK and elsewhere. But putting teaching centre stage does not mean putting teachers centre stage as Will Ryan points out in this game-changing book.

On another school visit I remember observing a VIth Form sociology lesson, led by a forceful, erudite and obviously well-educated lady teacher of a certain age. Part of my role was to try and engage the class in a range of thinking skills activities but every time I put a question to the students, she would pipe up with her answer whilst the students looked on in a combination of embarrassment and frustration. Her classroom, and I have seen this in many other teachers at all levels of the education system, is the place where she showed the world how clever she was. A visit from someone like me was her time to shine and she was not going to let it go. The saddest thing was that I don’t think she even noticed what she was doing.

Next time you find yourself in a classroom with a group of young people, take the time to step back from yourself and observe who is at the epicentre of things. Are you the one leading the lesson? Are you the one with all the great one-liners and funny quips? Are you the one to whom all the questions are asked and from whom all the answers emanate? Are you the one who is coming out looking great? Are you the one coming out looking clever? Are you the one coming out looking tired … ?

The time after that when you are sitting down to plan your next lesson, at the top of the planning sheet, write those words, ‘It’s not about you’. Then plan the sort of lessons that allows for children to be inspirational, to amaze and confound you with just what they are capable of thinking and doing.

And, if you have trouble doing this, then this is where the book in your hands will help. The following pages are a distillation of Will Ryan’s many years of experience in the classroom, as a headteacher and as a highly-regarded advisor in planning opportunities that bring the best out of children, all children, by designing wonderfully creative learning that is relevant, useful, engaging and comes from the heart, not from the government–led scheme of work.

At a time when there is so much pressure on teachers to teach children things to pass exams to make other people look good, it is all the more important that we remember the power that teachers have to change lives. The child who leaves your lesson walking ten feet tall because of the chance they had to be wonderful has learned something much more valuable than if all they got to do was to memorise the kings and queens of England while the teachers showed how clever they were.

The difference between the two sorts of lesson is down to you.

Ian Gilbert Santiago de Chile January 2011

Overheard in the Classroom

Teacher: Right, come out here in front of the class. Now then, what is the staple diet of the Boro Indian of the Amazon Basin?

Mickey looks for help from the class but there is none.

Mickey: Fish Fingers.

Teacher: Just how do you hope to get a job when you never listen to anything?

Mickey: It’s borin’.

Teacher: Yes, yes, you might think it’s boring but you won’t be saying that when you can’t get a job.

Mickey: Yeh, yeh, and it’ll really help me get a job knowing what some soddin’ pygmies eat for their dinner.

Willy Russell, Blood Brothers (1983)1

Chapter 1

Inspirational Teachers, Inspirational Learners

The only time my education was interrupted was whilst I was at school.

Winston Churchill

The Prologue

It was 1993 and the early spring sunshine was streaming through high Victorian windows as I walked into the classroom. Skies were blue, trees were turning green and the birds sang. I was feeling positive because I thought I was turning the corner in my second headship. At last, I thought, the school was on the way up. I moved towards a table with a spare chair and sat with a group of children. I turned to Jenny, a rather sweet eight-year-old with flowing blonde hair, and asked, ‘Tell me, Jenny, what are you learning about today?’ In gruff, flat Yorkshire vowels she replied, ‘Well, if you ask me it’s all a load of rubbish.’

The thing about working in primary education is that the highs can be very high but the lows can be very low.

The children were cutting out parts of diagrams from a pre-published worksheet and sticking them onto another piece of paper to depict the water cycle under the heading of ‘The Journey of a River’. The activity was relatively undemanding and there was little evidence of pride in what was going on.

I asked Jenny to explain why she wasn’t enjoying the lesson. She told me to walk to the end of the lane and look at the river because there were dead fish floating on the surface. She then told me that her grandfather and a group of friends (who were local miners) had in the past ‘clubbed together’ to buy fishing rights. They told her how they had racked their brains to prevent kingfishers and herons from robbing them of their investments. She knew about the boats that used to travel between the local coal mine and the power station pulling huge floating skips full of coal that would be used to generate electricity. She spoke of paddling and damming the small brook that feeds into the river. Then she told me how the river would eventually flow under Europe’s largest suspension bridge and into the Humber ports. She concluded: ‘We shouldn’t be doing the journey of a river – we should be doing the story of a river.’

Those thoughts stayed with me for many years. I learned so much from her comments and further researched the idea of using an emotional hook to engage pupils’ learning. I started to explore the concept further and found out how the limbic system in the brain works in precisely that manner. I also spent much time considering the key elements that would be in Jenny’s story of a river. I pictured the group of enterprising miners and their need to think in order to seek solutions. I thought about how literacy and the arts could be involved and how the ‘story of a river’ would create a sense of awe, wonder and spirituality. As I did this, a new model of pupil creativity started to emerge in my mind that would be fit for the century we live in.

Time moved on. Jenny continued to point out the school’s failings to me. She was a ‘school council’ all on her own. Jenny moved to secondary school and I moved on to join the local authority’s school improvement service.

More or less fourteen years after that fateful day in Jenny’s classroom I was sent to a school with several newly qualified teachers to observe them teach as part of the borough’s monitoring programme. The head took me to the first classroom and introduced me to one of the NQTs, saying, ‘Will, may I introduce Jenny Cole.’ We both looked at each other and said, ‘Oh no,’ followed by, ‘We have met before.’ Both phrases were uttered in perfect unison. I was looking straight into the eyes of the former pupil who had seemed to invent the concept of student voice.

I asked about the lesson that I was about to watch and I was told it related to the journey of river. I was handed the lesson plan which had been downloaded from the internet. The session involved a diagram and the children sequencing sections of text so that they could piece together the story of the water cycle. In Ofsted terminology the lesson would have been graded satisfactory.

The thing about working in primary education is that the highs can be very high but the lows can be very low.

When it came to providing feedback, I reminded her of our conversation all those years ago and told her how I had learned so much from her remarks.

Without further comment from me, she said, ‘I didn’t follow my own advice then, did I?’

With the trace of a tear in her eye, she went on to say that she found the job so frustrating because her mind was full of ideas. She had wanted to take the class to different locations along the local river. She had wanted to take them to an abandoned warehouse by the wharf and sketch the disused buildings and then set an adventure story there. She had wanted to take her class of disadvantaged children up into the Pennine mountains to find the source of the river and feel the icy cold water as they paddled in the youthful beck. She had wanted the children to go to the river estuary before it flows into the sea, to watch the fish being unloaded onto the dockside and then to meet the crew of the lifeboat. She concluded that sometimes her mind was so full of plans that her head hurt.

I asked her why none of her ideas were possible and got the response: ‘I am not allowed. We have all been told that there can be no time for extras because we have to raise standards by 5% in English and mathematics. The literacy subject leader said the class couldn’t do story settings until next term. I was not able to go to the coast because the Year 6 class always do contrasting environments. I was also told the health and safety issues are too great and there would be problems because the parents wouldn’t pay the voluntary contributions. And besides, the leadership team told me that we all followed the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA ) schemes and there was no need to deviate because all I had to do was make sure the children covered the journey of a river.’

The constraints were too great. And while we are simply managing them we will not be inspiring young lives. This book is based on an analysis of what our most inspirational teachers do. So ask yourself these questions:

When did you last inspire someone?Are you content with the answer?Do you feel the need to read on?

This is a book that tells you what inspirational teachers do.

The difference between a person achieving their expectations and exceeding them is inspiration

They say a good book should keep the readers guessing until the last sentence. Oh well, what the heck. I will give you the answer in the first paragraph. What is it that inspirational teachers do? In short, they plan for their pupils to be inspirational. This book will tell you about the wonderful things that creative teachers do to make such a difference to children. I often ask teachers why they came into their chosen profession in the first place. Many of them reply that they were taught by inadequate teachers who made them want to provide a far better and more exciting education for our youngsters. Others speak with a clarity of detail about stimulating and influential teachers who inspired their lives and how they wanted to do the same for others. I have listened to these people with envy – I have heard descriptions of inspiration that can put a lump in the throat and a tear in the eye.

So let us consider those unnerving questions that all teachers should ask of themselves: When did you last inspire someone? Are you happy with the answer? Because teachers should always be seeking to inspire young lives. If you want to know more then read on. This book will give you a model to develop inspirational teaching in your school or classroom that will make a genuine difference for the twenty-first century.

Me, fail English? That’s unpossible

How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?

This question, along with the heading to this section are just two of the many famous lines from The Simpsons. You may love it or hate it, but you cannot doubt its success. Over the years it has had a string of famous guest stars queuing up to be part of the show including Tony Blair, three out of the four Beatles, Elton John, Dustin Hoffman, Pierce Brosnan, Sting, Buzz Aldrin and soccer star Ronaldo. The show has grossed over US$54,000,000. So why introduce the subject of The Simpsons at this stage? The creator Matt Groening was told by his teachers that his drawings and stories would never catch on and he should pursue a more solid profession. By contrast he was so inspired by his first grade teacher Elizabeth Hoover that she exists as a key character in the programme. She clearly spotted Matt’s talents at an early age and said to him: ‘I like those pictures and stories. Can I have them?’ Those simple words of encouragement inspired him and gave him the self-belief that helped him on a journey to riches and success. Teachers should never doubt their capacity to make or break lives.

It has been said that every person born has six significant talents. Two come to the surface quickly. The next two are brought out by other inspirational individuals who are often teachers. The final two talents are taken to the grave. Teachers have sometimes been very poor at spotting talent. Jilly Cooper’s school report stated: ‘Jilly has set herself a very low standard which she has failed to maintain.’ John Lennon’s observed that he was ‘certainly on the road to failure … hopeless … rather a clown in class and wastes other pupils’ time’. Lord David Owen’s teacher savagely wrote: ‘If I had to select an expedition to go to the South Pole he would be the first person I would choose. But I would make sure he was not on the return journey’.

However other school reports have spotted significant hidden talents. Jeremy Paxman famously asked Conservative politician Michael Howard the same question twelve times on a Newsnight broadcast in 1997. The answer to the question was simply either yes or no. On each occasion Howard tried to wriggle out of providing a direct answer. Many political pundits argued that the interview did considerable damage to Howard’s career. So what did Jeremy Paxman’s school report say: ‘Jeremy’s stubbornness could be an asset if directed towards sound ends.’2

The school of failures

But first of all, let’s pretend that you are a teacher marking your register. Is this the class from heaven or hell?

Imagine the following list of names being on your register: Simon Cowell, Richard Branson, Thomas Edison, Billy Joel, Christina Aguilera, Walt Disney, Sean Connery, Freddie Laker, Bill Gates, Rosa Parks, Snoop Dogg, Eric Hoffer, Michael J. Fox, Alan Sugar, Martin Luther King, the Wright Brothers, Jacqueline Wilson, J. K. Rowling and Judi Dench. Would you rub your hands with glee at having a class of such talent and capability or would you put your head into your hands in fear because of the awesome challenge you might face in extending these individuals?

The people listed above are all wonderfully successful and therefore potentially a source of inspiration to the rest of us. Some are great thinkers, some have a true sense of enterprise, some have great literary and artistic qualities, others have considerable spiritual and emotional intelligence. If we were to score them on the scales produced by England’s now defunct QCDA relating to their (very much alive) personal learning and thinking skills (PLTS) this class would score very highly. To a greater or lesser extent these are people who are communicators and critical and creative thinkers who can solve problems. They are reflective learners who can demonstrate resilience. They are effective participators in society and also team workers. However if you were to ask if they learned these considerable qualities at school, or did they become inspirational because they were taught by a string of inspirational teachers, then the answer would be a resounding NO!

The truth is that these individuals never made it onto any school’s register of gifted and talented pupils. But they do have something in common. They are all listed on various internet sites of famous ‘high school dropouts’. The list also includes Albert Einstein, who once famously said, ‘Don’t worry about your problems with mathematics. I assure you mine are far greater,’ and Frank Zappa, who on the notes for one of his album sleeves urged others to ‘drop out of school before your mind rots from a mediocre educational system’.

A further analysis of those who seemingly ‘failed’ at school would reveal at least eighteen billionaires, hundreds of millionaires, ten Nobel Prize winners, eight US presidents and dozens of best-selling authors. Mensa, the high IQ group, includes many who failed at school amongst their ranks.

This list of people who fell short of reaching their true potential at school is daunting. As a result, each one of them will have had to demonstrate significant personal qualities in order to achieve their subsequent success. We live in a world that requires these strengths, but we operate a dated education system that focuses heavily on testing and imparting academic knowledge.

I write these comments on the twenty-first anniversary of the 1988 Education Reform Act which brought us the National Curriculum and primary school league tables. I recently had a bizarre dream in which teachers and school leaders up and down the country held street parties to celebrate the coming of the age of the National Curriculum. Most of the festivities were informal affairs where the revellers designed and made their own slippers and created pizza toppings. This seemed appropriate as there was a period in the midst of the era where nearly every school followed QCDA schemes of work and where such activities were commonplace in almost every primary classroom in the country. Heavy prescription through the National Curriculum, testing, targets and league tables has resulted in an impoverished curriculum in too many schools. These last twenty-one years represent dark days. Many schools just stopped thinking for themselves. This suited successive governments as they sought to create a compliant workforce of school leaders and classroom practitioners who followed the rhetoric to the letter because they were fearful of the real or perceived penalties of failure.

Over more recent years some brave and exhilarating head teachers alongside talented teachers have turned their back on central diktats and started to lead a revolution. The best of them have done it with true style and created an exciting, rich and vivid curriculum in their schools which meets the needs of the children in their care whilst achieving high standards and positive Ofsted inspection outcomes along the way. The purpose of this book is to provide passion, energy, belief and values, to add further fuel to the flames and to provide strategies to create inspirational teachers who create inspirational pupils.

Having identified those who did not achieve well at school, you might take the view that schools have served many others perfectly well. You could also argue that the individuals on the list ‘came good’ anyway. However many people with the same qualities as Richard Branson or Sean Connery left school simply believing they were deemed to be a failure. They will have under-achieved as individuals; their true talents will have been forever hidden leaving the rest of us poorer because we never benefited from their potential excellence.

The Bash Street Kids

Lovers of The Beano will remember with affection the strange collection of misfits who attended Bash Street School. In the twenty-first century the kid in blue trainers at Bash Street School should be able to rise to the fore despite the adversity that may exist around him. This is the era of the information superhighway – the internet. Access to sporting and cultural activities is available to all. Schools receive funding and training to spot those children who are academically able – or gifted – and those who are talented. However schools don’t have a sufficiently successful track record of changing lives and too often a child’s life chances are significantly determined by where and to whom they are born. The Sutton Trust reports that social mobility is currently no better now than it was in the 1970s.3

Why is this the case? In 2007 a Unicef report on the well-being of children ranked the UK as the worst of the twenty-one wealthy nations surveyed using a range of measures, including the degree to which pupils are happy at school.4 Children get just one childhood: it should be a magical and happy time and their primary education should leave a host of positive and deep meaningful memories that last for the rest of their lives. However there is evidence that many children find school life stressful. On the opening day of the Key Stage 2 Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) in 2008 I was sitting with a colleague who told me that her son had gone through thirty-five mock SAT papers prior to the tests. In my role as school improvement partner I spoke to a child who told me that in Year 6 children didn’t do science, they just worked through revision books. The government puts tremendous pressure on local authorities to get schools to improve their results. In turn, local authorities put pressure on schools which then put pressure on teachers, and this can affect the educational diet received by vulnerable children who are often at the bottom of the chain. Even the former head of the QCDA, Dr Ken Boston, has stated that ‘the assessment load is huge and far greater than other countries and is not necessary for the purpose’.5

However there has never been a time in our history when the need to develop inspirational pupils has been so acute.

The future of the world as we know it

In 2009 a string of huge businesses crashed. High street names like Woolworths and MFI boarded up their shopfronts. Established banks were on the verge of collapse and a seven-year-old in an inner city school turned to me and said, ‘Eh mister, this credit crunch is right frightening.’

I asked him to expand further and he explained how his mother who was a single parent was already holding down three different jobs in order to make ends meet and how the disappearance of household names was unnerving him. I listened to his concerns for a while and then told him to get on with colouring in his Roman soldier because it would take his mind off it. It was poor advice. Children growing up in the twenty-first century are deeply worried about their futures and they know that the current generation of primary school pupils will have to solve a series of significant problems, including:

Global warming and other international issues including fighting starvation and disease in developing countries.Finding a replacement for oil and increasing competition for dwindling natural resources.Creating a sense of social cohesion at a time of a declining sense of local identity.The threats of terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.Providing care and finance for an increasingly elderly population.The effects on physical and mental health in a nation where too many people seem to work twenty-four hours a day and seven days per week, sometimes just to make ends meet financially.

I am fully aware that not all the students currently passing through our schools are going to solve the world’s problems. However viewers of the YouTube favourite ‘Shift Happens’ will have digested the following stark information:6

By 2012 the nation with the most English speaking citizens will be China.Those responsible for the US labour market predict that most school leavers will have had ten to fourteen jobs by the time they are thirty-eight.One in four people have been working for their current employer for less than a year and one in two for less than five years.The number of text messages sent every day exceeds the population of the earth.The amount of technical information doubles every two years.Three thousand new books are produced daily.There are five times as many words today as during Shakespeare’s time.There are 2.7 million searches on Google every month.One in eight couples who married in the US and UK in 2008 met online.

In short, we are educating children to do jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that don’t yet exist to solve problems that don’t yet exist. Now this makes the problem of inspiring young lives even more difficult.

Lord Sandy Leitch, in his report on employability skills in 2006, identified a new skill set that the nation would need.7 These include:

Critical thinkingProblem solvingCommunicationCollaborationCreativitySelf-directed learningInformation and media literacyAccountability and adaptabilitySocial responsibilityLiteracy and numeracyInformation technology.

Yet too many schools under the guidance of the government, the national frameworks and Ofsted simply trundle along teaching key facts about the Ancient Greeks, stressed vowels and the six wives of Henry VIII, and seem all but oblivious to the fact that today’s youngsters will live and work in a knowledge making world and not a knowledge applying world. In order to equip our children well for the future they need to encounter inspirational teachers who absorb their students in learning. This new learning will include not only knowledge (because children do need something to study) but also an array of skills that are pertinent to the twenty-first century.

Through the best teachers our children will be inspired to develop life-changing attitudes. They will understand the importance of global awareness, human rights, empathy and ethics. They will embrace business and enterprise skills including risk taking and how to work collaboratively by influencing and negotiating with others. Learners will heighten their sensitivity and creativity through a love of literacy and the arts. Children will feel increasing positivity through understanding the fantastic power of their own brains as they imagine and develop new solutions. They will also develop willpower and resilience and recognise the importance of giving and receiving feedback.

So what kind of lessons are required?

For individuals to feel fulfilled in life they need to discover their own meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion. This is what Ken Robinson calls ‘the element’.8 People in their element connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose and well-being. Being there provides a sense of self-revelation, of defining who they really are and what they are meant to be doing with their lives. To achieve it we have to help youngsters find aptitude and passion through instilling positive attitudes and creating opportunity. Some people are fortunate and can look back to particular teachers who had them bounding through the doors each school day and leaving them wanting more. These teachers inspired pupils and changed lives. They excelled on a daily basis, engaging hearts, minds and souls, often in spite of the basic culture and mindset of our education system which frequently seeks to push aside learning activities that require an emotional response, the senses or a good portion of our brains.

So what is it that inspirational teachers do? Well, the first thing they do is to recognise that achieving inspirational responses from children favours the well-prepared mind, and therefore some direct teaching is required. They then seek to get the balance right in several key areas, such as:

• The balance between teacher talk/modelling and pupil activity should be in the proportion of 1:4. The trouble with this ratio is that only teachers with the very highest expectations have the confidence to hand over the responsibility for learning to the children. Ian Gilbert, writing in my book Leadership with a Moral Purpose, talks of the need to replace, as the quote goes, the ‘sage on the stage’ with the ‘guide from the side’.9

• The balance between the teaching of knowledge, skills, understanding and attitudes, recognising that the latter will be significant in developing the child as a good learner.

• The balance between dependency on the teacher, independence and interdependence on the other pupils around them. After fifteen minutes of sitting with their teacher on a carpet for the opening part of a lesson too often children shuffle off to groups to work alone.

• The balance of time, recognising that great and deep learning cannot necessarily be achieved within the middle part of a three-part lesson. Many children are frustrated by bells and timetables and wish to absorb themselves in their tasks and challenges and return to them again. Teachers often come to me with work produced by their pupils saying, ‘Look at this, it’s a piece of work with real quality.’ When I ask them what constitutes ‘quality work’ the silence can be deafening as they strive for the right words. So here is my definition of high quality work:

– It reflects pride and perseverance.

– There is evidence of creativity, originality and/or uniqueness.

– There have been high levels of independence and/or collaboration.

– The work clearly builds on prior learning.

– The challenge contributes towards the child achieving one or more of their learning targets.

The notion of schools and teachers having their own qualitative definition of high quality work that is separate to the national frameworks and level descriptors is important. Just take a look at the two samples below of children’s’ writing taken from the 2009 Key Stage 2 SATs for Writing. There is a world of difference between the two extracts. The second was produced by a pupil who had been in the country for less than one year and clearly contains many errors. However they do have something in common: they were awarded exactly the same score by the markers.

The noise subsides as students settle down. What a cacophony louder than a rock festival is now a murmur quieter than a cricket. Stragglers rush past in dribs and drabs worrying about how angry their teachers will be.

(Extract from a 140-word answer to the task)

I was in the market and all people were rushing around. It smell like a pig! Everone was droping the food in the basket. The food was nice but the people wasn’t. I was woking round the market to buy a chocolate.

(Extract from a 70-word answer to the task)10

When a school has its own definition of high quality work which has been discussed with pupils, or comes from the pupils themselves, it will help the quality of the children’s endeavours to spiral in an upwards direction. Learners will understand what they have to submit to their teacher, especially if they want the rewards of seeing their work displayed or being included in celebration assembly.

There are however a number of other key balances to get right. Guy Claxton in his brilliant book What’s the Point of School? talks about the conflict between ‘just in case learning’ and ‘just in time learning’.11 The first of these is a traditional model that exists in many schools. A classic example would be teaching the children about the key events in Victorian Britain just in case they will need it in later life. And to be fair it might be helpful in the pub quiz at The Dog and Partridge. Using a just in time learning model the teacher may say to his or her class, ‘Next term we are going to study the Victorians and at the end of the term you will be required to run a museum for the day with key exhibits which will inform others about Victorian life. You need to have interactive presentations and a digital film to show the visitors. Now children, what do we need to learn and when do we need to learn it?’ This format will work because it is real-life learning based upon the notion of getting something interesting done. Usually we learn best when the process is a means to an end in itself. In real life significant learning often takes place when the timing is opportune because in real life people zoom in on a specific bit of information just when they need it. A practical example of this approach is included in Chapter 4.

Another balance that needs to be achieved relates to ‘the dollops curriculum’ (where children receive a dollop of literacy followed by a dollop of history followed by a dollop of PE and so on), and the need to secure steady improvement within a range of key learning skills. In redesigning the secondary curriculum in 2008 the then government identified six generic skills that pupils must develop if they are to become successful learners, responsible citizens and confident individuals. Much transformational work will need to take place if children are genuinely to become, as the personal learning and thinking skills framework suggests, independent enquirers, creative thinkers, reflective learners, team workers, self managers and effective participators. Inspirational teachers have intuitively recognised the importance of these skills and sought to develop them through rich activities in the lessons they teach. They have always recognised that real and deep learning does not come from merely delivering pre-packaged programmes of study. Chapter 2 is designed to help school leaders to develop their own personalised and outstanding curriculum that fulfils the needs of children growing up in the twenty-first century.

If children are genuinely to achieve the goal of being successful learners, responsible citizens and confident individuals they need to encounter inspirational teachers who will have sufficiently high expectations to encourage them to take far greater responsibility for their learning. Schools and teachers need to make learning deep through giving them real issues to explore and not presenting tired topics that have been covered time and time again. Children need the opportunity and challenge of ‘getting stuck in’ to significant problems and challenges and feel they can make progress with them. Finally pupils need to work in collaboration with each other so they can influence each other through negotiation and thus learn together.

So how does it all fit together? Here is my model of how inspirational teachers create inspirational pupils.

Inspirational teachers, inspirational pupils

You know when you are in the presence of an inspirational teacher. Yes, there will be an element of direct teaching involved because, in the famous words of R. F. Dearden in his landmark text on primary education, ‘discovery favours the well prepared mind’.12 In the best primary classroom there will be the direct teaching of phonics and calculation and guided reading and many other aspects of essential learning. However as you walk into the classroom you will realise that teachers are guiding the learning rather than being the font of knowledge.

Next you experience an electricity that seems real and you can sense the hairs tingle and feel goosebumps appear. The sensation is similar to static electricity. The classroom buzzes. There is an air of expectation. The children are learning from every word that is spoken, there are eyes transfixed and they are desperate to rise to the challenges that will be set for them.

But what will these challenges look like? I have had the privilege of being in very many classrooms and observed closely what our best teachers do. I have asked questions of school inspectors and local authority advisers and come up with the following conclusions.

Make them think and make them think hard

The first thing that inspirational teachers do is to make pupils think – and think very hard. Their brains work so hard that there is the metaphoric smell of burning in the air. But they do this willingly in the knowledge that their thoughts and contributions will be valued and respected. In his book And the Main Thing is … Learning, Mike Hughes argues that in some lessons it can take as long as seventeen minutes for pupils to be required to think hard.13 As a local authority adviser/inspector I have sat through many lessons where the children have not made significant strides in their learning because the steps they are required to follow are too small or on other occasions too many steps are included in the lesson. In contrast the inspirational teacher has a classroom that is akin to a gymnasium of the brain where it is stretched and made to work very hard. This gymnasium is not a self-inflicted torture chamber of unpleasant and tedious chores. (When I go to the fitness centre I refuse to enter if I can’t get a parking space near the door!) This gymnasium of the brain is closer to a labour of love. A rich range of thinking opportunities is provided. This helps the children to conceptualise new information, create a sense of empathy, develop a moral purpose and enhance emotional and spiritual intelligence as well as constantly maintaining concentration and focus.

In short, the inspirational teacher believes that classrooms should be places where thinking, questioning, predicting, contradicting and doubting are actively promoted. They develop children as active creators of their own knowledge. This is done through providing high quality opportunities for sequencing and sorting, classifying and comparing, making predictions, relating cause and effect, drawing conclusions, generating new ideas, problem solving, testing solutions and making decisions. Chapter 3 will provide further information about the importance of developing thinking classrooms – ideas for you to exploit and grids that will help you to examine the effectiveness of thinking skills in your school.

Creating enterprising individuals

Young children are naturally enterprising. It is one of their most striking features. Seven- and eight-year-olds during their school holidays, through play, will quickly turn their home into a restaurant or a television studio or a school. Resources are made, roles allocated and a business plan devised. Older children (often boys) will create their own football tournaments, decide how long each game will last, organise league tables, cup draws and maybe even a transfer system. Inspirational teachers fully recognise the value of enhancing learning though developing activities that allow the children to be enterprising.

From my travels around schools over the last year I have seen many wonderful lessons in which teachers have allowed children to take an enterprising approach to learning. It works. The growth in knowledge and understanding is phenomenal as is the development of key life skills and positive attitudes. I have encountered seven-year-olds who have been required to run a restaurant for a day following a term’s study around food and healthy eating. Another class were asked to stage their own version of We Will Rock Youfollowing a fabulous visit to London’s West End. Rotherham schools regularly run a project called, ‘Make £5 Blossom’ whereby each child in a class is given £5 to set up their own business that will return a profit in six weeks time, but the school provides nothing for free and everything must be paid for. The products and services provided by the children are ingenious. Pupils carry out their own mergers and takeovers, and extra staff (in the form of classmates) are recruited. The children learn and develop significant key skills including team work, negotiating and influencing, creative and original thinking and the essential but often overlooked skills of financial literacy. Additionally many of the best enterprise topics can have a strong ethical dimension. Chapter 4 will provide further information about enterprise education including an array of ideas for you to exploit and self evaluation tools that will help you to examine the effectiveness of enterprise education in your school.

Literacy and the arts provide magic

Many inspirational teachers have recognised the power of the arts and literacy in providing children with the essential skills of communication, representation and expression. In 2000 Ofsted stressed their importance:

Many of the schools we visited make particularly strong provision for expressive arts and have developed extensive programmes of special events and performances. Work in the arts is seen as providing opportunities to demonstrate success, promote pupils’ confidence and strengthen their communication skills. Many teachers argued that success in the arts has particular value for those who have little success out of school and that the improved confidence it brings transfers to other subjects.14

The arts and literacy have the wonderful capacity to engage the part of the brain that creates an emotional response. In the nineteenth century educationalists like Descartes would have argued that emotions in learning were a nuisance. Excitement and empathy would have been seen as disruptive to the learning process. Our knowledge of neuroscience now paints a totally different picture. The neurologist Antonio Damasio argues that learning without emotion or intuition simply produces intellectually clever people who behave stupidly.15 Equally, a great deal of learning takes place through the senses. We think in sounds and pictures and movements. We can learn through stories and poetry, dance, music and art. The neurophysiologist J. Z. Young was right to argue that ‘human life depends upon language, art and the complications of culture as much as on food and that it would ultimately collapse without them’.16 For many experienced teachers this form of creativity dates back to the 1970s. It was sometimes associated with a laissez-faire form of learning through creativity that lacked any form of genuine rigour. Often that criticism was deserved. However in the hands of our best teachers it could lead to truly magical and life-changing learning, as shown in this account from the United States:

I was supposed to be a welfare statistic … it is because of a teacher that I sit at this table. I remember her telling us one cold, miserable day that she could not make our clothing better; that she could not provide us with food; she could not change the terrible segregated conditions under which we lived. She could introduce us to the world of reading, the world of books and that is what she did.

What a world! I visited Asia and Africa. I saw magnificent sunsets. I tasted exotic foods. I fell in love and danced in wonderful halls. I ran away with escaped slaves and stood beside a teenage martyr. I visited lakes and streams and composed lines of verse.

I knew then that I wanted to help children do the same things, I wanted to weave magic.17

Chapter 5 will provide further information about how schools can make best use of literacy and the arts and promote communication, representation and expression. It provides ideas for you to exploit and self-evaluation tools that will help you to examine the effectiveness of the provision with in this area in your school.

Awe, wonder, emotional and spiritual Intelligence

During a conference at which educational pioneer and devisor of the multiple intelligence approach to human genius, Howard Gardner, was launching his book The Unschooled Mind he was asked, ‘Is there anything that a child must learn at school?’ He answered that children should learn about what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, what is fair and what is unfair, what is beautiful and what is not, and the holocaust.18 It is a statement worthy of deeper analysis and careful consideration.

Children get just one childhood and it should be memorable and life forming. School leaders and teachers need to ask themselves: If we don’t create a sense of awe, wonder and spirituality in children then who will? It is certainly the case that not all children can rely on their parents to do so. Therefore the first element of this work is to create wonderful, rich and vivid life-changing experiences that might lead to either a sense of electricity coursing through the body or alternatively a sense of inner calm and peace. We seem to live in an era of safeguarding, risk assessments and sterile learning environments where children are protected from falling over and getting scabs on their knees. The importance of protecting children at all times is obvious. However primary education should still be about taking children to the coast to see stormy seas and to mountain tops via waterfalls and fast flowing streams. They should feel the frost with their fingertips and the wind and driving rain on their face. In winter they should build snowmen and in autumn kick up the leaves. Away from the natural world they should see mighty steam engines, elegant buildings and sit in places of worship. These are all sensations that bring a true sense of awe and wonder. However they also bring a sense of spirituality which helps them understand and care for the world in which they live.

It is important that children develop a spiritual intelligence that allows them to make sense of their complex world. In a period of global warming, depleting mineral resources and a rapidly increasingly and mobile population, children need to learn how to care for the planet and its people. The diversity of Britain’s population is changing fast. Recent statistics show that the number of babies with foreign-born mothers has almost doubled in the last decade. In some cities, including London, Slough and Luton, more than half the babies have mothers born overseas and in the London borough of Newham the figure is 75%.19 Many people wrongly see this as a negative which brings with it a sense of friction. In contrast Robert Putnam, a political scientist and Professor of Public Policy from Harvard University, states that evidence suggests that creativity is enhanced by immigration and diversity. Immigration is associated with rapid economic growth rather than a loss of jobs.20 When I was the head teacher of an inner city multicultural school I was amazed by the curiosity and respect the children had for each other and the richness and diversity of life. I greatly missed this when I moved to an all-white school.

When children develop an understanding of what is special about each other they are more likely to understand what is special about themselves. This in turn will raise self-esteem, self-belief and aspiration. This is important. Daniel Goleman would tell us that a person’s life chances are more dependent on their emotional intelligence rather than their IQ.21 Over recent years there has been a recognition of the importance of the social and emotional aspects of learning. Schools are now teaching children to have self-belief and also modelling a culture of respect and tolerance. But the reality is that they spend just 15% of their time in school and then they go home to watch Ann Robinson on The Weakest Link and a host of celebrity and talent shows in which they learn that disparagement is not only acceptable but amusing.

Chapter 6 will provide further information about how schools can develop a sense of awe and wonder and develop pupils’ spiritual and emotional intelligence. It provides ideas for you to exploit and self-evaluation tools that will help you to examine the effectiveness of the provision for developing emotional and spiritual intelligence in your school.

Using the book

Having read the above synopses and studied the diagram at the start of this section you may be expecting that each chapter will be discrete and a separate entity. You would be wrong. Whilst each chapter can be used individually each one is deliberately influenced by the others. The chapter you are reading at any one time should have the spirit of the other seven. This is deliberate and is designed to give a holistic rather than a compartmentalised view of the work of inspirational teachers. I hope it gives school leaders and classroom teachers the courage and faith to create exceptional learning experiences for the youngsters in our care.

Have courage, have faith

As an inspector and local authority adviser I have observed many lessons. The exceptional quality of a few has blown my mind away, whilst others are like that famous quote about Wagner’s music – they have wonderful moments but tortuous half-hours.

Prior to carrying out lesson observations I like to meet the staff, set the criteria